You send your tasks to dobby@dobbymail.com, and it'll send you a todo list every morning. You can reply to complete, postpone etc.
The point is to not have a separate place for seeing and managing a giant database of todos. You only ever see what's relevant now, and in the place you already look for everything else (email).
I do--it slows down the work because of the effort of finding big blocks of time to record, but when I'm recording I know I'm on the clock to hit my goal.
Basically I know I need to have a worthwhile video title, so I can't fiddle for more than a minute or two!
Thanks! Yeah it's almost an insane amount of video, but I've made it fairly easy to skip to the interesting parts if you want to see them. We'll see how it goes :)
Having been part of a fast-growing YC startup, I wanted to show what the early days of making a product are actually like—so I'm building a startup product myself and video recording the entire process.
Literally every minute I spend working on Shuffleboard is recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Each video is a couple hours long, and shows both my face and my screen as I work. There are about 30 sessions and about 70 hours of work so far.
- Talking about who my customers are and what value I'm trying to create for them
- Designing the basic UX
- Interviewing potential users
- Running usability tests
- Designing a brand
- Maintaining a product backlog
- Reading documentation
- Writing code
- Fixing bugs
- Learning how to write unit tests
- Spending days trying to figure out Firestore security rules
- Prepping for a mini-launch (including writing this HN post)
- Getting stuck/bored/tired
- Making lots of mistakes
Next steps:
- Sales
- More usability tests/interviews
- More features
- Improving the visual design
- Subscriptions with Stripe
Tech stack:
- React + Create React App (with styled components)
- Firebase for the db (Firestore), plus Firebase auth and hosting
Like in any startup, there's a rollercoaster of ups and downs. The visual brand was designed in a couple hours, but figuring out how to finally secure the Firestore database took almost a week. There are moments where I'm having a blast, moments where I want to give up, and lots of hours where nothing much happens at all.
Yeah, it's normally a pretty basic task--in this case I was working with Firestore, which required a special nested structure to be able to write the security rules I needed. A week is a bit of an exaggeration anyway--it's a couple hours a day for a few days.
Funny how we say Goldman "is ensnarled in scandal" rather than "perpetuated a vast fraud".
Almost makes it sound as if the real news isn't their reprehensible actions, but the fact that they got caught! (Or even that the government is slowing them down with annoying charges).
The question is to what extent this is institutional rather than fraudulent actions of a few individuals. It probably is institutional, of course, but innocent until proven guilty and all that.
Exactly. The issue isn't that he made a choice, it's that he made a different choice first--not too long ago--and made it public.
Sure, walk back a commitment if it's the right thing to do--but your employees/investors will be right to ask why you made the commitment in the first place.
You send your tasks to dobby@dobbymail.com, and it'll send you a todo list every morning. You can reply to complete, postpone etc.
The point is to not have a separate place for seeing and managing a giant database of todos. You only ever see what's relevant now, and in the place you already look for everything else (email).
1. https://dobbymail.com/